Thursday, March 02, 2017

Totalitarian MEPs steal immunity from Le Pen to strengthen their monopoly on power

To say the least, Marine Le Pen is one of the three top (bold face) candidates in the April-and-May presidential elections in France. All the other candidates are elementary particles: Fillon, Proton, Macron, Neutron, Hamon, Meson, Mélenchon, and Positron. It's an eye-catching sign of the lack of diversity that all of the men who run have names that end with an "-on" given the fact that none of the men in the list Bidault, Blum, Auriol, Coty, De Gaulle, Poher, d'Estaing, Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy, and Hollande did. You may be forced to go back to Napoleon to find the most recent previous elementary particle that led France. ;-)

She's too complex for them and the elementary particles and their allies do everything they can to get rid of their competitor who is so different.

Two days ago, a committee of the European Parliament voted 18-to-3 to strip her of her immunity in the case of some tweets. Today, the whole Parliament has confirmed that decision by an "overwhelming majority" – we were not told what the numbers actually were. Thankfully, my MEP voted against the proposal. He wrote that "he doesn't like when the political contest is waged through the criminalization of the competitors". Exactly.

Why would someone investigate her at all? In December 2015, a truly nasty would-be journalist has claimed that Le Pen's National Front is "basically the same" as Daesh. This was obviously a disgusting libel and Le Pen had all the moral rights to defend herself e.g. by shooting the jerk dead. But she reacted much more calmly that.

She showed a difference between the National Front and Daesh by posting some three pictures of the most famous recent acts by Daesh – especially the beheading of a U.S. citizen, James Foley, that you may remember – embedded within a tweet simply saying "this is ISIL". With this picture in front of one's eyes, a person who is at least slightly decent should admit that the National Front indeed is nothing like Daesh, and apologize to Ms Le Pen.

It was a normal and sort of obvious argument that many others would have used in the same situation. Le Pen's party isn't really beheading any people. It is not doing anything of that kind – not even much milder things – and it isn't even planning to do anything that would be at least a "homeopathic dilution" of Daesh's notorious acts.

Incidentally, some people say that she has shown disrespect to the late James Foley by having posted the pictures or videos. I think it's absolute verbal rubbish designed to harm Le Pen's image. Her act of posting clearly meant that she was disturbed at the human level and felt all the sympathies towards Mr Foley. By refusing to see someone's fate, you are not showing your increased respect to that person: you are just protecting your own stomach.

In the European civilization, one expects to have the freedom of expression – and this important message by Ms Le Pen had very good reasons to be communicated, indeed. Ms Le Pen must have relied on her freedoms combined with her lawmaker's immunity. The immunity really exists to guarantee that the lawmakers – representatives of their citizenry – won't be afraid of expressing their opinions when someone could hypothetically blackmail them with a prosecution – because the communication of their opinions and their transformation into the laws is what their job is all about. (The members of the European Parliament can't do the latter – they're not actual lawmakers, only apparatchiks in the EU Commission have the privilege to propose laws; but one used to hope that they may at least communicate their opinions.)

For some strange reasons, the country of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité has a law that discourages the citizens from displaying any violent images under some circumstances – which are not clear to me. I am not sure whether people may sell shooting computer games in France. Violators of this ban may pay up to €75,000 and spend up to three years in prison.

I don't know whether Le Pen knew about this law and was thinking about this law. Even if she was, she may have assumed that she was shielded from any potential prosecution by her immunity. One must say that the French law preventing you from displaying any violence is bizarre according to most Europeans in the EU member states. With such bizarre laws, you may start to understand why some French consider Muslims to be their brothers. Islam doesn't allow you to draw pictures of Prophet Mohammed, France apparently doesn't allow you to draw pictures of violence, either by Prophet Mohammed or his overt contemporary followers.

Whenever the traditions of a EU member state would differ from the "majority of the EU" in a similar way, the European Parliament would be very likely to suppress the "national specifics" of that nation and impose the European habits, directly or indirectly. Look e.g. how Hungary and Poland – and their governments' work with the constitution etc. – is being demonized in the European Union's institutions. In some cases, the European country with different laws or traditions would be harassed, criticized, or it would become a target of sanctions. That's not what happened here. The European Parliament happily endorsed the strange French law.

It is absolutely clear that the reason why it did so had nothing to do with the hypothetical "severity of the crime" that Ms Le Pen could have committed. She just posted a picture that was available basically everywhere. Sometimes, parts of the pictures were covered but if you spent a few minutes on the Internet, you could have easily found the uncensored pictures, too.

Ms Le Pen was harassed – and is being harassed in other contexts – not because she has done something obviously bad that these investigations are trying to find but because she is a politician and her politics is inconvenient for a certain class of people who would love to keep the permanent monopoly on power even though some roughly 50% of the Europeans are strongly against them. This is unacceptable and it shows that the European Parliament isn't really a democratic forum that would guarantee that large groups of the Europeans are being heard when policies are being invented at the EU level.

Instead, the European Parliament has become one of the machines whose purpose is to eradicate freedom and democracy on the European continent, along with other Western values, traditions, and lifestyle. The MEPs who have voted to throw Ms Le Pen to the investigators have voted to send dogs at an impeccable woman whom they find politically inconvenient. Be sure that before 1989, Czechs became very familiar with such a selective treatment of the citizens in the previous 50 years. On the other hand, they have basically confirmed that they want to suppress any criticism of the Islamic radicals (including killers in Daesh) because this is what Ms Le Pen's tweets were really about.

The most visible conflict is one between the peaceful Westerners on one side and the Islamic radicals. Most of these MEPs have bragged to be at least soft allies of the Islamic radicals (or at least stronger allies of the nasty would-be journalist who was comparing the National Front to Daesh) – and opponents of the critics of the Islamic radicals. It's an unholy alliance we mustn't forget about.

I do hope – and believe – that Le Pen will win any trial in a court if this story gets there. After all, this is not the first time when the European Parliament tried to strip her of the immunity. In 2013, they did it again because of some comparison of the Muslims to the German forces in France around 1940. Two years later, however, she was freed according to the Free Speech Act.